Problem and Narrative Poems
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which appeared in December 1871, four
months after the publication of _Balaustions Adventure_, was written by
Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland. His interest in modern
politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his
work as a poet. He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who
because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. He had
rejoiced in the enfranchisement of Italy. During the American Civil War
he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written
when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. He was at
one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the
parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this
question altered. He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a
separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends
Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the
Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend,
to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the
statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in
opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of
opportunism--that which conserves rather than destroys--Browning
thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special
reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his _Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.
Browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "Saviour of Society,"
who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally
applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order
to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the
past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between
conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy
fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the
whole preferred a veritable _civitas hominum_, however remote from the
ideal, to a sham _civitas Dei_ or a real Cloudcuckootown. "It is true,
that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it
is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were
confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but
though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their
inconformity." These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more
profoundly studied than ever Browning's was, might stand as a motto for
the poem. But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words
should be added--"All this is true if time stood still." Browning's
pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with
reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire.
He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a paladin
of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done
genuine service--though not the highest--to France and to the world. "My
opinion of the solid good rendered years ago," he wrote in September
1863 to Story, "is unchanged. The subsequent deference to the clerical
party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is
doing little harm to the general good." And to Miss Blagden after the
publication of his poem: "I thought badly of him at the beginning of his
career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the
promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think
him very weak in the last miserable year." It seemed to Browning a case
in which a veritable _apologia_ was admissible in the interests of truth
and justice, and by placing this _apologia_ in the mouth of the Emperor
himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give
the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the
exposition of a complex human character, required.
The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning
condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm
pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the "Saviour of Society" with
his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. He was to
demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a
respectable place for drab. This may be undertaken with skill and
vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. _Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if
this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a
prose discussion. Browning's intellectual ability became a snare by
which the poet within him was entrapped. The music that he makes here is
the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the dickens!"
The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself
in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be
considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first
instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings
and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in
a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for
renewed delight. We return to _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ as to a
valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence
of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these,
we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of
Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a
wise mysticism. Browning's Prince is not a conservator possessed by this
enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the
work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility.
He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face
of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties,
who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further
communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man's
strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the
thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least
change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made;
and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God. So long as
he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was
permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. Now
that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves
into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may
put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but
with the present needs of the humble mass of his people--"men that have
wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by
intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere"
throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world
arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor,
who left him no mere "shine and shade" on which to operate, but the good
hard substance of common human life.
All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning,
who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world
of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of
sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant
but not perhaps less useful. Nor would it be just to overlook the fact
that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the
prudent casuist. The splendid image of society as a temple from which
winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of
the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.[113] The record of the Prince's
early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy--
Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever!--
with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of
Mrs Browning.[114] And the characterisation of the genius of the French
nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as
"the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray
surroundings:--
The people here,
Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride
Above her pride i' the race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful--
Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow:
Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave
Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous
In Art, the--more than all--magnetic race
To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.
It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "O Star
of France!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both
the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy.
To these memorable fragments from _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ one
other may be added--that towards the close of the poem which applies the
tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of
the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood
of the world--"The new power slays the old, but handsomely."
In _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ there is nothing enigmatical. "It is
just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so
Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume.
Many persons, however, have supposed that in _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872)
a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of
the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning's biographer
Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing
cynicism." The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion
came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had
seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a
subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal
suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment
against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the
world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from
entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be
playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be
characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and
come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a
printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the
public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as
possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. It should
be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the
bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in
this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it assumed
new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an
actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall
stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling,
Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal
fidelity is as much the subject of _Fifine at the Fair_ as the virtue of
tar-water is the subject of Berkeley's _Siris_. The poem is in fact
Browning's _Siris_--a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no
break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.
But before all else _Fifine at the Fair_ is a poem. Of all the longer
poems which followed _The Ring and the Book_ it is the most sustained
and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out passages of
peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would
here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and
what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. The
joy in freedom--freedom accepting some hidden law--of these poor losels
and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy
figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined
beauties--Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church--the
half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of
music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play
of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as
the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion,
the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness
fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones
gleaming--all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem,
yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.
It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue
or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both
shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of
the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the
world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so
near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a
different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which
yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the
epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came
upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for
behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great
desolation. But the last word of the epilogue--"Love is all and Death is
nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have
surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed
between them, when it is seen aright. Browning's idea in the poem he
declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, "was to show merely how
a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by
sophistry." No more unhappy misnomer than this "Don Juan" could have
been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life,
no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate
explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much
fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character
and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and
his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional
work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with
his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling
expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in
years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its
speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that
comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a
relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires
to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions--illusions
needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be
forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain
is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever
reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies,
philosophies, scientific theories--these change like the shifting and
shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of
another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable
and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew
more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire
for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.
The speaker in _Fifine at the Fair_ is far more a seeker for knowledge
than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by
illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be
termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he
argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain,
its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he
expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his
own. And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to
knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own
self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the
weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more
widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by
Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning's poem consists
chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true
of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of
knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his "Analogy" desired, to take
lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of
love and knowledge--imagination aiding his intellect--is compelled, amid
his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning's own
lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning's own conclusions. Saul,
before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for
Browning, "God and the soul stand sure." He sees, as Browning sees, man
reaching upward through illusions--religious theories, philosophical
systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly
attainments--to the Divine. The Pornic fair has become the Venice
carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the
wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the
gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained
by love Browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he
is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his
belief, that the permanent--which is the Divine--can be reached through
a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt
to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached
points:
His problem posed aright
Was--"From a given point evolve the infinite!"
Not--"Spend thyself in space, endeavouring to joint
Together, and so make infinite, point and point:
Fix into one Elvire a Fair-ful of Fifines!"
If he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or
of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: "Out
of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant." He will
undoubtedly--let this be frankly acknowledged--grow in a certain kind of
knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that
comes through love. The poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in
entire accord with Browning's own deepest convictions and highest
feelings.[115]
Although in his later writings Browning rendered ever more and more
homage to the illuminating power of the affections, his methods
unfortunately became, as has been said, more and more scientific,
or--shall we say?--pseudo-scientific. Art jealously selects its
subjects, those which possess in a high degree spiritual or material
beauty, or that more complete beauty which unites the two. Science
accepts any subject which promises to yield its appropriate truth.
Browning, probing after psychological truth, became too indifferent to
the truth of beauty. Or shall we say that his vision of beauty became
enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor
corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins
and nerves? To say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. His own
defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which
occur near the close of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_:
Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace
Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.
And he would have pleaded that art, which he styles
The love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things
For truth's sake, whole and sole,
may "crush itself" for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. But
the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the
dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic
suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a
repulsive story as that of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ served now as
well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its
grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral
wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption--sensuality and
superstition, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration
with aid of the scalpel? The incidents of the poem were historical and
were recent. Antoine Mellerio, the sometime jeweller of Paris, had flung
himself from his belvedere in 1870; the suit, which raised the question
of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in
1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning's place of summer
sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning's hand. It was
an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of
realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the
botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a
lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as
the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because
it was, he thought, a story with a moral. He did not merely wish to
examine as a spiritual chemist the action of Castilian blood upon a
French brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited
faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism--the scepticism
induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he did not merely
wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against
itself. His purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism
which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and
discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as
sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight.
Granted the conditions, it was, Browning maintains, an act of entire
sanity on the part of his sorry hero, Monsieur Léonce Miranda, to fling
himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to
our Blessed Lady, the bespangled and bejewelled Ravissante, to bear him
in safety through the air. But the conditions were deplorable; and those
who declined to assist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are
responsible for Léonce Miranda's bloody night-cap.
The moral is just, and the story bears it well. Yet Browning's own
conviction that man's highest and clearest faith is no more than a
shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. An
iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of
unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. If our best
conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with
the parables accepted by other minds than our own? The answer is
twofold. First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths
attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained
through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and
terrified propitiations, which led Léonce Miranda to reduce his right
hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along
the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin.
Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a
progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion
is treason against humanity. Therefore his exhortation is justified by
his logic:
Quick conclude
Removal, time effects so tardily,
Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared,
Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may,
And serve world's use, since use is manifold.
The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to
some Father Secchi to "tick Venus off in transit"; only never bring bell
again to the partial-ruin,
To damage him aloft, brain us below,
When new vibrations bury both in brick.
For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel
gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist.
The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the
psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful
adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief
gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very
admirable specimen of her kind--the _mamestra brassicae_ species of
caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted
the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection
of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf--such is the
irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.
The second narrative poem of this period, _The Inn Album_ (1875), is in
truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative
frame-work. It is as concentrated as _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is
diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic
concentration. A recast of _The Inn Album_ might indeed have appeared as
a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief
masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "A Yorkshire Tragedy"; it moves
with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe.
The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear
off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous
chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning's tale of
crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of
Elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." He was right; but he
should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces
of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The
story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of
which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a
tragedy of the soul. The _dramatis personae_, as refashioned from the
crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would
naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning's genius. A
martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,--these are the
central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a
ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained
by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion.
And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the
English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so
seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here:
The wooded watered country, hill and dale
And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist,
A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift
O' the sun-touched dew.
We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the
little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of
turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery.
After all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent
address:--"Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!" and only certain
incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with
irony.
In this poem Browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and
simply dividing the evil from the good. We are not embarrassed by the
mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not
held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised
sympathies of the writer. We are no more in doubt where wrong and where
justice lie than if Count Gismond were confronting Count Gauthier. The
avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young English
snob, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a "clumsy
giant handsome creature," who for a year has tried to acquire under an
accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not
succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of
strength; "for ability, all's in the rough yet." Of his education the
best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love. And
now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of
occupation for his big, idle boy's heart; he wants something to do,
someone also to serve. Browning wishes to show the passion of
righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing
as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human
nature. The huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral
temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him
to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends
its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage
and there and then makes an end of it. His big red hands are as much the
instruments of divine justice as is the axe of Ivàn Ivànovitch.
The traitor of the poem is "refinement every inch from brow to
boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning's
villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of
the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of
that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete
man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily
affect. There is here and elsewhere in Browning's later poetry somewhat
too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a
wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world's acquaintance
with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it
quite good manners. The vulgarity of the man in the street may have a
redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of _naïveté_, in it; the
vulgarity of the man in the club, "refinement every inch" is beyond
redemption. The exhibition of Browning's traitor as having slipped lower
and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his
one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic
stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its
demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes,
are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some
credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to
discover and interpret aright. The melodramatic is often the truth
falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become
tragic. There is much in Shakespeare's plays which if treated by an
inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. Browning
escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite
forget its neighbourhood. When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn--as
was Guido--
Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain,
there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw
the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment--though
too late--a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser
self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in
their starkness and cruelty.
The lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow
Oppressed by sweeps of hair
Darker and darker as they coil and swathe
The crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black,
her passion, her despair, her recovery through chilling to ice the heart
within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to
sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his
last fraud, and her self-sought death--the lady is dangerously near the
melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic
figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she
the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective
care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy,
her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at
work:
Did you love me once?
Then take love's last and best return! I think
Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there,--roams enough,
But, having run the circle, rests at home.
Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be
true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma
of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes.
The _Pacchiarotto_ volume of 1876 was the first collection of
miscellaneous poetry put forth by Browning since the appearance, twelve
years previously, of _Dramatis Personae_[117] There is, of course,
throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in
an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of
_Pacchiarotto_, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine,
and which invigorates while it--not always agreeably--bobs our head, and
dashes down our throat. But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it
may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery. The speciality
of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not
a little running comment by Browning upon himself and his own work,
together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics. There is
a little too much in all this of the robustious Herakles sending his
great voice before him. An author ought to be aware of the fact that no
pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one
who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he
repel. In the _Epilogue_ the poet informs his readers that those who
expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also
sweet demand the impossible. Sweet the strong wine can become only after
it has long lain mellowing in the cask. The experience of Browning's
readers contradicted the assertion. Some who drank the good wines of
1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were
strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. Wine-tasters must make
distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it
to be remembered as an extraordinary year.
The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, "timed by raps
of the knuckle," how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a
world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed Siena,
with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for
himself. He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the
paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled
evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous--not
indolent--_laissez-faire_, playing, as energetically as a human being
can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for
all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the
rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and "Things rarely go
smooth at Rehearsal." Browning's joy in difficult rhyming as seen in
this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to
wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible.
At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the
challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for Tennyson's
diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were
found for "Ecclefechan" and "Craigenputtock." But in rhyming ingenuity
Browning is inferior to the author of "Hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant
effrontery he is inferior to the author of "Don Juan." Browning's
good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from
his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready
successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of
sound and sense. In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed
reader to appreciate the wit of Browning's retort upon his critics: "You
are chimney-sweeps," he sings out in his great voice, "listen! I have
invented several insulting nicknames for you. Decamp! or my housemaid
will fling the slops in your faces." This may appear to some persons to
be genial and clever. It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity
of Pope's poisoned rapier. Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a
little outrageous.
The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in _At the Mermaid_ disclaims the
ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic
_Welt-schmerz_, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of
life. Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs
his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. Such is
the drift of the verses entitled _House_; a peep through the window is
permitted, but "please you, no foot over threshold of mine." This was
not Shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was
with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature. He did not stand
in the window of his "House" declaring that he was not to be seen; he
did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at
home and not at home. In the poem _Shop_ Browning continues his
assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is "a temple-worship
vague and vast." Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and
jewel-selling is the goldsmith's--but do you suppose that the poet lives
no life of his own?--how and where it is not for you to guess, only be
certain it is far away from his counter and his till. These poems were
needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be
vouchsafed to them.
But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of
self-assertion. The two love-lyrics _Natural Magic_ and _Magical Nature_
have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale
of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability.
_Bifurcation_ is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses
duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier
way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses
passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the
harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which
was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In _St
Martin's Summer_ the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a
love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon
passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that
is defeat. _Fears and Scruples_ is a confession of the trials of
theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee. What
had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries;
what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the
natural law of heredity. Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it
would have borne fruit:
All my days I'll go the softlier, sadlier
For that dream's sake! How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought "The gladlier
Lives my friend because I love him still?"
And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the
obstacles of partial ignorance.[118] The blank verse monologue _A
Forgiveness_, Browning's "Spanish Tragedy," is a romance of passion,
subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness
gleams especially one resplendent passage--the description of those
weapons of Eastern workmanship--
Horror coquetting with voluptuousness--
one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now
replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is
voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in
Italy related in _Filippo Baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos
of _Holy Cross Day_, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew
of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's imagination
a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. _Cenciaja_, a
note in verse connected with Shelley's _Cenci_, would be excellent as a
note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the
Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes
of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into
verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume
sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve _Numpholeptos_ for the
close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to
face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a
tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost
Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the
bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow,
silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The
subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over
this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an
abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood?
Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and
pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and
sweet as she appears, she is _La belle Dame sans merci_, and her
worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 112: See Morley's "Life of Gladstone," vol. iii. p. 417.]
[Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.]
[Footnote 114: Pages 58-60.]
[Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood
supposed that certain passages of _Fifine_ were directed against
himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.]
[Footnote 116: Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros
the subject of her "English Tragedy."]
[Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of
the volume which I wrote on its appearance for _The Academy_.]
[Footnote 118: See Browning's letter to Mr Kingsland in "Robert
Browning" by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.]